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Suburbia

Writers - Tennant/Lowe
First released - 1986
Original album - Please
Producer - Stephen Hague (album version); Julian Mendelsohn (single)
Subsequent albums - Disco, Discography, PopArt, Pandemonium, Ultimate, Smash
Other releases - single (UK #8, US #70, US Dance #46)

The Boys have described this song as an "epic of mad dogs and hooligans" that was inspired by a film of the same name by Penelope Spheeris about aimless, disillusioned young toughs running rampant in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Very much the urbanites, Tennant and Lowe use this track as an opportunity to express what they consider to be "the full horror" (as the subtitle of one of the remixes puts it) of suburban life, where nastiness and evil lurks just beneath a superficially attractive surface.

The dogs mentioned in the lyrics and whose barking frames the track probably symbolize the underlying bestialism of humanity; Neil has specifically described them as representing "the threat of violence." (Please see my annotations below. One site visitor has pointed out that wild dogs inhabiting the L.A. suburbs play a significant role in the Spheeris film. The opening scene, for instance, depicts a dog mauling a baby. This probably gave Chris and Neil the idea in the first place to use dogs so prominently in the song.)

The single version is a totally different recording than the album version, done with a different producer (Julian Mendelsohn as opposed to Stephen Hague) in an effort to increase its hit potential—as Neil has put it, "We made it much bigger sounding"—a gamble that paid off. "Suburbia" proved a very successful single in Britain, though somewhat less so in the States.

Chris has noted, by the way, that the bassline for this track is "virtually the same" as that of Madonna's "Into the Groove."

Annotations

The word "suburbia" dates back in English at least to the nineteenth century (and probably even earlier), though its roots are in Latin. The lyrics seem to imply that it comes from a blending of the words "suburb" and "utopia," though this may be nothing more than a bit of wordplay on Neil's part. (He says, "Suburbia—where the suburbs met utopia.") But "suburbia" is actually one of several plural forms of the ancient Latin word suburbium ("under city"), which meant pretty much what the word "suburb" means today: the outlying area surrounding the "city proper." So it in fact has nothing whatsoever to do with "utopia," a word coined from Greek roots (οὐτόπος, meaning "no place") by Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, in which he described a fictional ideal society on an imaginary island in the Atlantic Ocean. Because it was pronounced exactly the same as another Greek derivative meaning "good place" (εὖτόπος, or eutopia), the word utopia was, in effect, a pun on More's part. Given the song lyric's stated association of "suburb" and "utopia"—and the fact that it makes the suburbs sound anything but utopian—the Boys are themselves suggesting a pun, albeit a far darker, more ironic one: a dystopic pun, so to speak.
As mentioned above, this song was inspired by the 1984 film Suburbia, written and directed by American filmmaker Penelope Spheeris. It's likely that a few bits of the song's lyrics were borrowed from lines in the film. In one scene, two young men in a car discuss their belief (which I discount above) that the word "suburbia" comes from a blending of "suburb" and "utopia." In the same scene, one of these guys refers to the buildings they're driving past, saying, "These are the slums of the future." A similar line ("These slums of the future?") can be heard in certain remixes of "Suburbia," such as "The Full Horror."
"Lost in the high street" - Non-British fans may be perplexed by the occasional use of the term "high street" in PSB lyrics. In Britain the main or most important street in a town is often referred to as the "high street." In the United States, the same street might be described even more informally as the "main drag." (Many towns have a street indeed named "Main Street," which is often though not always the actual main/high street. In some cases it was at one time the true main/high street but has since been superseded in that respect by another street; its name remains, however, as a reminder of its past status.)
Another source of inspiration, as described by Neil in the booklet that accompanied the 2001 reissue of Please, were "the riots in Toxteth and Brixton." (There were major riots in both Toxteth and Brixton in 1981 and again in Brixton in 1985.) He went on to say, "I remember some friends of mine having to drive through the riots in Brixton to visit me in Chelsea, and being scared. Brixton was a prosperous Victorian suburb, and eighty years later it had become this decaying inner city. And there was a feeling that the riots had been started by the police hassling these kids hanging around a bus stop." This is alluded to in the song's lines:

Stood by the bus stop with a felt pen
In this suburban hell
And in the distance a police car
To break the suburban spell

It's worth noting that Brixton's population in the years since the Second World War has been predominantly Black in the wake of a major Afro-Caribbean immigration wave in the post-war era. So there's likely a racial/racist component to the police behavior in question.
Neil noted that the sampled sounds of dogs barking and pertinent lyrics ("where the dogs run…. run with the dogs tonight") are inspired both by the aforementioned film and the Boys' own personal experiences: "The dogs in the song come totally from the packs of dogs in the film, though I remember Chris telling me that it happened in Liverpool when he lived in Toxteth—these huge packs of dogs…. I used to be a bit scared of dogs—my sister once got bitten.… [T]hat's a symbol of the threat of violence."
"I only wanted something else to do but hang around" - As Neil has said, "The middle bit sums up why we are having this riot.… People are bored."
"Where's a policeman when you need one to blame the colour TV?" - Neil: "Then it refers to the aftermath being reported on TV, just sociological nonsense and police officers blaming television for the whole thing. People always say, 'You can never find a policeman when you need one'…."
"This is their hour of need" - Neil describes an intentionally (and bitterly) ironic subverted meaning with this line: "[T]he hour of need isn't the people in the suburbs needing jobs [as one might expect], it's the media needing their talking heads to talk a load of nonsense."

Mixes/Versions

Officially released

Mixer: Stephen Hague
- Album version (5:07)
  - Available on Please
Mixer: Julian Mendelsohn
- 7" Edit Version (aka New Version) (4:04)
  - Available on Discography
- Video Mix (5:11)
- Suburbia Part Two (2:25)
  - Available on a U.K. "Suburbia EP"
Mixer: Julian Mendelsohn and Pet Shop Boys
- The Full Horror (8:58)
  - Available on Disco and the Further Listening bonus disc with the Please reissue
Mixer: Arthur Baker
- The Full Horror Video Edit (5:07)
- Arthur Baker Club Vocal Mix (7:10)
- Arthur Baker Dub Version (7:58)
  - There are some slight differences of a few seconds in the lengths of various iterations of these mixes depending on their individual release dates and formats. There are also some minor differences between the original Baker Club Vocal Mix from 1986 and its digital remaster in 2023—not different enough, in my opinion, to delineate them as different mixes.
Mixer: Stuart Price
- Pandemonium CD live version (5:12)

Official but unreleased

Mixer: unknown
- Acapella BBC Version
Mixer: Stuart Price (?)
- 2009 studio version for the Pandemonium Tour (5:10)
Mixer: Arthur Baker
- Arthur Baker 7-inch version (3:59)
  - Appears on an official EMI reference CD by Abbey Road Studios designed for client review before determing the tracks for the 2001 reissues bonus Further Listening discs.

List cross-references

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